Best practice | by Danny Meadows-Klue
The Guardian achieved the stepchange in social media by involving its audiences deeply within the sites. They created mass reach by syndicating content across many social media platforms.
Web 2.0 in newspapers
The Guardian led the UK news media industry on embracing social media. "The investment is on being more Web 2.0”, explained Guardian SEO Carolyn McCall.
“We’re putting more video in and we’ve had audio from some time - those are improvements and enhancements which will make it a much better user experience. There are a lot of revenue streams behind video and audio. Even when you are investing, you can see there’s revenue attached to that everywhere you look.”
The traffic numbers reflected well. Over 16 m users were on the site by July 2007, collectively clocking up over 157 m page impressions (July 2007).
The Guardian has become king of the blogs and masters of community in the UK. Their increasingly open website generated new opportunities for content, which in turn fuelled growth. They’d succeeded in genuinely becoming neutral about their content platform.
Key strands in publishing strategy at The Guardian:
- Embracing of blogs and comment
- Intensive campaign to encourage postings from readers
- Clear search engine optimisation strategy
Digital strategy director and development, Simon Waldman, is clear that social media didn’t suddenly arrive at The Guardian. “We have had community elements on our site since launch nearly a decade ago”, but he’s conscious that the publishing journey is far from complete: “we still have much to do here. But we are learning all the time.”
“Comment is free is one of the most ambitious engagement projects launched by any newspaper. Built around the bedrock of the newspaper’s comment - we have brought in dozens and dozens of new contributors; and each day we have hundreds and hundreds of comments. We don’t pre-moderate comments, but we do remove those that are abusive or potentially defamatory.”
“I would be lying if i said it had been entirely easy - perhaps the best way to describe it is to paraphrase the old nursery rhyme: when it is good, it’s very, very, very good - but when it’s bad, it’s horrid.”
“In the good bits, our readers demonstrate what brilliantly smart, witty and well informed people they are - and how well they know the Guardian.”
Principles
The content strategy of The Guardian from 2006-2009 typified several key principles:
• Deep understanding the importance of long tail content
• Fostering citizen journalism and engagement
• Exploring new digital channels for wider deployment
No surprise that the group was among the first to distribute on PDAs, Twitter, RSS and content aggregators.
